Here Comes the Viking

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"You walk into the coffee shop, and the girl asks how your day is. When I first moved here, I loved that. I know it's shallow and superficial and she doesn't give a fuck about my day, but I still like it," he says. Sweden, by contrast, is more reserved. "It's difficult to get to know a Swede. But once you do, you're in," he says. And there's a stronger sense of boundaries. "You're never going to see a television show The Skarsgårds."

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Shame. It would be a fascinating show to watch. The Skarsgård family—Alexander has five younger brothers and a younger sister—is based in Södermalm, the island neighborhood in Stockholm long known as a home for writers, artists, and other bohemians. Imagine Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with more herring. Every day they observe what is known as the Roll Out, in which Stellan and whichever children are around escort the clan's 81-year-old matriarch, Gudrun, in her wheelchair to a hallowed old beer hall named Kvarnen that functions as fan headquarters for Hammarby, the local soccer team and one of Skarsgård's obsessions. Gudrun will have one beer and two shots of Fernet-Branca. ("She's over food," Skarsgård says.) Later Stellan spends the rest of the afternoon cooking, his primary passion. The tribe gathers once again for dinner and wine.

To place this most un-Hollywood idyll in context, it's important to understand exactly how famous Stellan Skarsgård is in his home country: Think George Clooney—if George Clooney was the only internationally famous actor in an entire country with a tradition of revering actors.

What that meant for Stellan's eldest son is that, even in civilized Sweden, Alexander grew up constantly aware of being in the public eye. As a tween, he dabbled in acting himself, most notably in a film called Hunden Som Log (or "The Dog That Smiled"), but was freaked out by the girls soon lining up outside the house and quit. He never expected to act again.

Both father and son repeat the same vignette from Alexander's childhood—clearly a piece of family folklore. "He was always full of energy," says Stellan. "When we'd walk down the street, he would run ahead to the curb—where he knew to stop—and then run back to me. Then to the curb, then back. Shorter and shorter distances until I caught up."

The image—son venturing out into the world, staying just this side of danger and then darting back, while father ambles watchfully behind—is as good as any to sum up their relationship. There's an old joke that has the rebellious sons of circus performers running off to join an accounting firm; likewise, the son of a bohemian actor might find himself enlisting in the Swedish Royal Navy's antiterrorist division.

True, military service was nominally compulsory in Sweden at the time, but it was also easily avoided with any number of excuses. (None of Skarsgård's brothers served, nor did their father: "I was busy smoking pot," Stellan says. "It seemed terribly inconvenient.") It is more common to do one's duty in an office somewhere, rather than as a member of the elite SäkJakt unit—the name roughly translates to "protect and hunt"—responsible for patrolling the vast archipelago outside Stockholm for various forms of sabotage.

Skarsgård is the first to poke fun at the notion of the Swedish military, which saw its last serious action around the time of the Northern War, 300 years ago, but it was an important challenge for him. "It was my way of going off into the unknown," he says. "I didn't want to just be somebody's son."

And he did have one action-packed night, in which he and the squadron he was commanding were asked to investigate a false alarm involving someone slipping from a small submarine onto one of the archipelago's thousands of uninhabited islands. "I'd been playing war for fifteen months, and now we were carrying live ammunition," he says. There was no enemy to be found on that little island, but Skarsgård was exhilarated nonetheless. Whatever test he had needed to set for himself in the military, he'd passed.

"We just climbed back into the little boat, nobody saying anything, and headed north under the stars," he says.

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Our sea is equally silent, an unbroken, notably whaleless, gray expanse. Children are growing listless and impatient, even as we pass a large buoy crowded with sea lions. The Two Harbors comes into sight of an oil rig. "Look, a person!" a little girl cries as a tiny figure appears on the rig. I find it impossible not to think of Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, in which Stellan Skarsgård's character is paralyzed in a gruesome offshore-drilling accident. Alexander says he didn't hesitate when von Trier offered him a role alongside his father in Melancholia. "I told my agents, 'I don't know what I'm doing. Maybe I'll be getting coffee. But I'm taking this,' " he says. In the event, he plays a groom marrying Kirsten Dunst, at a wedding that takes place while a massive planet hurtles on a collision course toward Earth. Von Trier has called it the first of his films to have a sad ending, something that should instill deep foreboding in anybody who's seen his other laughfests. Stellan plays his son's best man.

Indeed, to whatever degree The Skarsgårds is an Oedipal drama, it's one remarkably free of neurosis. "I don't think I came to acting to compete with my father. But, you know, he wasn't around as much as normal dads, and seeing his passion...Maybe it was a way to get his attention," Skarsgård says with a shrug. He grins, exhibiting a surprisingly goofy overbite that brings to mind his tiny but memorable role as a male model in Zoolander. "I mean, if anything, we're trying to take care of him. He's over the hill."